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I have had Windows 7 RC1 installed on a partion of my desktop machine at home for a few weeks and have been reaping the benefits of the new OS. Having recently purchased a new laptop for more general use around the house I decided to take the plunge and see how it performed on this newer piece of hardware. The laptop was a standard Dell Inspiron 1525 purchased from retail outlet that came pre-installed with Vista Home Premium edition and all the usual Dell extra’s. The Windows 7 installation went very smoothly and all the pieces of hardware were recognised and the drivers installed.

My only problem occurred when I tried to connect the laptop to my wireless network running WPA-PSK encryption. Windows 7 would recognise the existence of the wireless network but it would not allow accept the personal security key that I was using. Obviously, I was not the only person experiencing this issue with the wireless network within Windows 7. The solution was relatively painless. I just need to update the driver for the wireless hardware to the current one offered by Dell for Vista.

Having downloaded and installed the Vista 32-bit wireless card driver for my 32-bit Windows 7 OS and then done a quick reboot I was able to connect the laptop to my wireless network.

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How do I delete offline folders from a Vista machine when there is no connection to the server?

There was an issue with Vista that it would not allow you to delete or rename folders that were cached by Offline Folders when you were working offline. The fix to this issue is available here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942845/en-us. I found that since I was already using Vista SP1 the actual hotfix was not required I just needed to insert the relevant registry entries and reboot my machine.

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When the time comes to update your Flash plugin and yours suddenly stops working you might want to take a quick look at http://www.jasondunn.com/vista-flash-problem-youtube-250 . I had updated my plugin to 9,0,124,0 and got confirmation that everything installed OK, however after doing a bit of surfing it quickly became apparent that this was not the case. I followed the guidance provided by Jason and the plugin is functioning normally again.

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I have had a problem with my Vista Ultimate laptop when I have been using an external monitor which has been a pain for a while. Basically, when I unlocked my machine whilst it was connected to an external monitor, Vista would set the refresh rate of my external monitor to a value higher than the monitor was able to display. Consequently I would end up with a blank screen on my external monitor.

The simple fix has been to open the Display Settings (desk.cpl), choose my external monitor and then change the refresh rate back to a more sensible value. I can’t remember when this problem started with my desktop monitor but it was one of those things that, although anoying, I just put up with. Today I decided enough was enough and began the quest for a more definitive solution.

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Having rebuilt my desktop using Windows Vista SP1 (32-bit) I was getting a bit confused as to why my list of recently used programs where showing up empty? I had made sure that the relevant option had been selected within the Start menu properties…

But still nothing was appearing on my Start Menu and I wondered if I had found a bug in my SP1? It turns out that I should read the next page of the Vista manual. Click the Customize… button and Hey Presto!

Under the Start menu size option my Number of recent programs to display was set to zero. No idea why it was set to that value and I dont remember setting it to zero, but once I had increased the value my recently used list of programs started showing up.